


Going to Graceland

by vtn



Category: Graceland (Album)
Genre: F/M, Family, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 04:06:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5442704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A father and son take a plane trip from Tucson to New York, and into the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going to Graceland

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kristin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristin/gifts).



> _Graceland_ is one of my favorite albums and has always seemed to contain the seeds of so many stories. I was thrilled to get the opportunity to write for it this year! Since you mentioned that you were curious about the connections to the songs, I tried to work them all into a cohesive narrative. So, be ready for lots of spot-the-reference and playing fast and loose with some of the imagery on the album. This was a super fun story to write, and I hope you enjoy it and have a very happy Yuletide! ♥
> 
> Thanks to [Isis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis) for a very helpful beta read.

I had been thinking a lot about abandoned places when I got the call from my ex-wife in Tucson telling me to come pick up my son. I had pictures of them plastered all over the wall in the little room I called my "office", even though I hadn't been working for a few years now--the Mail Rail in Britain, the old City Hall in Detroit, the crumbling Soviet monuments in the Balkans. In particular I had become obsessed with this one photo of an old abandoned military station on an island in the Indian Ocean. An abandoned relic of an abandoned war. Where there had once been torpedoes, now there were trees, poking their way up out of the weathered, dark edges of the buildings.

It had been about five years since I quit doing the show, and I was thinking a lot about the question: what do we become when we've outlived our purpose? It seemed especially relevant when your purpose was an inherently social one, like war or television. And now I was just alone, in my carefully constructed fortress of aloneness in my lonely little town, where everyone knew my name but not much else. I hoped that maybe I too could eventually be reclaimed by nature, swallowed up by the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley the way that the former army post was being swallowed up by the trees.

What happens to us when we've outlived our purpose? And I guess the answer is: that's when it's time for us to finally grow up.

\---

I was worried I was going to scream or sob or kiss her, but seeing her again, all I could think was that she looked tired, like she'd never looked when I had known her. Her eyes were dull. She didn't want to talk much, for which I was grateful.

"Al, I'm so glad you can take him," she said, and that was probably the strangest thing, hearing someone call me that again. I had been Charlie to everyone else, even my parents, since I was Albert after my grandfather. "I just need to get away. I need to heal."

"That's always been your response to everything," I said, unable to resist opening up the old wound. "You just retreat."

"Like you did anything different," she said. "Where have you been the past five years? Just retreating, just running away, just trying to escape." And then she was back, all of her, the diamond-hardness and diamond-brightness of her eyes. "I'm trying to come back from all of this"--meaning rehab--"and become a person in this world. When it's all over, you'll still be hiding." She sighed, and the light in her eyes went out. "But what's the point in hashing this all out again? As if we're still anything to each other. We both know our marriage was just this crazy thing. That's over now."

He had his head down as he left the sagging house, weighed down by the heavy air of the Arizona summer. I watched him as he sat silent and sullen in the back seat of her car as she drove us to the airport.

I couldn't deny he looked like me, with that same light brown skin, like my mother had had--not dark like my dad--and the same high-and-tight cut I used to wear my hair in, before I started shaving it all off.

She had told me he was doing poorly in school. Flunking his tests, skipping homework, not paying attention in class. One part of me didn't blame him. Another part of me resented him. I wanted to tell him, young man, you're lucky you even go to school. You're lucky your biggest problem is you have a mom who self-medicates with prescription drugs. But I didn't tell him that. We didn't talk at all, all the way from her house to the airport.

\---

"How do you even know my mom?"

It was the first thing he had said to me the whole day. We were already on the plane, the only sound the rhythmic humming of the engines below our feet. I had plied him with candy and soda, but he didn't want to talk. Even though my whole life I'd gotten from place to place by talking, I understood why.

When he said it, it felt like an accusation. Like I had to prove I really was who she said I was.

"It was at this little place called--" and then I remembered. "No, wait. The very first time I saw her, it was in Louisiana."

\---

It was summer back then, too. A good summer, before the magnetic pull of New York City drew me back into its hungry maw. Like I said, my one good skill was I could talk my way into anything, so while I started out selling cheap perfume on a square of carpet in the subway station, I eventually graduated on to magazine subscriptions, riding the wheezing buses from one state to the next and keeping my single charcoal business suit well-pressed.

When I got off the bus in New Orleans the whole city was buzzing with flies and with music. The rhythms of the buskers on the street reminded me of the market squares back home. I was desperate to get some alcohol in my belly and find a club where I could dance, up-close and sweaty, just drink New Orleans right in.

I figured I would ask someone for directions there at the bus stop on the corner of Lafayette, and there she was. Well-pressed as my suit, shiny as a new engagement ring, in a white tailored dress and diamond earrings. Her blonde hair was silver in the sunlight, her bob haircut curling under her ears.

I switched on the charm. (Us Mbala boys could always do that. I could almost imagine her son--our son, on a better day, with a smile cracking his face, wooing the girls of the elementary school.) "Good gracious," I said to her with a tiny bow, "You are just the prettiest thing I've seen. Could you tell me where a boy like me might be able to listen to some hot zydeco and dance with a girl like you?"

Her eyes were sharp and cutting when she looked back at me. She didn't say it, but I could almost hear it anyway: Girls like me don't dance. She looked away and kept on walking.

\---

He stared at me curiously. I couldn't really tell what was behind his eyes. They were hard like his mother's. Probably like mine.

"The party came after that. The magazine thing fell through. I was back in New York, homeless again--"

"You were homeless?" That look, now, I recognized. That was a straight-up 'you're shitting me' kind of look. And that was fair enough. It was probably hard to imagine Charlie Mbala of the Charlie Mbala Show the way I had been back then, young and broke and skinny and sleeping on my carpet square under the fire escape, with the moon glinting through its iron grating. It had been hard for me to imagine then, too, hard when I first won the green card lottery and came to America, my chest puffed full with bravado.

"If I am going to tell you everything, I will have to start from the beginning," I said.

\---

The beginning. The day Albert Charles Mbala was born in a little town deep in the Congolian Forest, born three months premature and weak-hearted and sallow-skinned. Surely that baby would have been doomed to die, if it hadn't been for the missionaries that had brought the new hospital to the jungle town, the new hospital with state-of-the-art laser surgery and shiny new equipment that brought the doctors up from the university down the river to perform experimental procedures. Doctors that knew how to isolate a three-month-premature baby in the NICU until he could breathe on his own.

They also gave the town another thing. They gave it a new name. They called it:Graceland.

The Graceland Hospital was still new in those days, and I was its first miracle. Much like the very Grace they had named the hospital after, my mother was Mary and my father was Joseph. And much like that holy child, the people came to see me as though their eyes were fixed on a blinding star. Yes, they came, people from the town and every town in walking distance, to see Albert Charles, the Boy in the Bubble. Even as I grew steadily on into adolescence, they would still marvel at me from time to time, and all of the attention sometimes made me think I might have a special power. As a young boy I would run at walls thinking maybe I could walk through them, or climb up fences and leap off hoping I could fly like Superman.

And in some ways, I guess, maybe that’s why I felt like I could do anything, at least back then.

My incredible luck followed me and gave me my green card, gave me my summer employment that let me travel from town to American town. Even when New York swallowed me back up and spat me back out, left me sprawled on the pavement with my face scraping against the hot concrete, I still believed a little bit of it. I would shine shoes by day, then around about dusk I would put on aftershave and put on my charcoal suit, just in time to brag and bluster and cajole my way into New York society parties, trying to satisfy my insatiable urge to know and be known.

That was where I saw her.

It took me a moment to realize where I'd seen her before, as the third person in our conversation ducked gracefully out, leaving just the two of us to try to place each other's faces. Was it the cinematographer's party a month before? The art gallery opening? And then I watched her tuck her hair behind her ear and I knew she was the angel who had emerged out of the dust in Louisiana.

And now here we were on Lafayette again, only this time it was the Lafayette Street in New York City, and I was walking with her to a basement club, walking easy. I didn't tell her where I knew her from. I only asked her her name.

"Elizabeth," she said sharply, and then gave me a dazzling smile. "But my friends call me Betty."

I told her, as we descended the stairs into an inferno of jazz and smoke, that my name was Charlie Albert, but she could call me Al.

This much had changed about her since she came up from New Orleans: she danced now. She danced just the way I had hoped, like she was sloughing off her skin and molting into a smooth chameleon. She danced up close to me, close enough that I could see the soles of her high heels, inlaid diamonds glinting at me from underneath the stilettos. I couldn't even imagine someone that rich could truly be real, diamonds on the soles of her shoes. I told her she could come home with me and she laughed and showed her teeth. I told her we should dance until dawn. I told her we would hop from club to club. Drunk on cocktails and the physical thrill of being close to one another, we danced in the street. We melted into each other's embrace. We fell asleep on a stoop on Upper Broadway, arms clutched around each other. We woke up in the gentle noonday sun and at that moment, for one last time, I felt like I could run through walls again.

\---

"And you were still homeless, back when you met her?"

"I was." At that moment, the dining cart rolled by, and I bought two roast beef sandwiches and two Cokes. I tore into the foil wrapper of my sandwich greedily while he methodically peeled his off. But then in perfect unison, we both took a gulp of our drinks and sighed: "Aaah."

"Keep on telling the story," he said, his face locked into a fierce expression, like knowing this would make up for nine years of being strangers.

"I was still homeless, mostly sleeping on couches at the homes of friends. More and more, it was Betty I was staying with."

His eyes gleamed. "And you were just sleeping on her couch?"

"Let us say I was."

"I don't think so."

"Maybe I wasn't sleeping on her couch so much," I admitted. "And you know, with Betty in those early days, the days were hard work, but the nights were so much fun. We would go to parties with the finest champagne and tiny shrimp cocktails, and then we would go out dancing. I would sleep in the morning and wake up at noon. Everything was all topsy-turvy."

"And then?" Of course he knew there was an and then.

\---

"Charlie," she said, her arms crossed over her chest, "You know I can't be the one to do all the work around here." She had come home and found me sleeping on the couch. Home. By then I had started to call it that, maybe not out loud, but certainly in my mind. Home meant her couch, her roof over my head, her hand in mine.

"I work," I protested, then I let my mouth relax into an easy grin. "You mean you can't be the only one to make all the money."

"Well," she said, and she actually seemed to be considering it. "I don't mean that exactly. It's more that I want us to be on equal footing."

"So you want me to also be wearing diamonds on the soles of my shoes? Because that's the footing you're on."

"Al." She ignored my words completely. "You have skills. You're smart. You could be doing absolutely anything you want to do and you're sleeping on my sofa."

"What if I want to sleep on your couch? What if that's my dream?"

"Is that what your daddy sent you to America for? To sleep on an American sofa?" My heart fell to hear her say that, and I was seeking my rebuttal when she added, "Well, actually, this sofa is British made," which was very typically Betty, and it was what I both hated and loved her for. So what else could I say?

\---

I glanced out the window at the prairie land below. I had always preferred the train over flying, preferred getting the chance to greet each town intimately as I rolled past, like an old friend. Because I was an old friend, from the days of the magazines and the Greyhound bus. An old friend the country had not seen in a long time.

"Why did he send you to America?"

"It was the natural place to be."

He looked out the window, following my gaze, simply listening. His mother had never been like that. She had always had something to say. I suppose he had become used to taking in all of her words and holding onto them, letting them sit in his head until he had a use for them. We had both been good at talking, his mother and me. Not so much, listening.

\---

Betty was right. I did have skills. Namely, I could talk my way into anything. As a result, I knew everyone in New York City. For instance, as it happened, I knew a TV producer, so I got a job working the camera for the news, and then one day they put me in front of the camera and I guess they liked me there well enough, because they never sent me back behind it.

I did the news every night. We moved into a better apartment.

Eventually when I felt it was right, I bought her a ring.

"No diamonds, Al?" she teased me, her face glowing as bright as the zirconium rocks. "Did you think I already had enough?"

"Don't you know where diamonds come from, Betty?" I watched her face shift through a few different emotions and I wondered if I would ever take her back there, to Graceland. To meet my father Joe, to leave flowers on my mother Mary's grave. I wondered if I could even imagine her walking along the market stalls, her diamonds catching the dust.

I wondered if I could imagine myself there, come to think of it. I had long since balled up my stinking carpet square and shoved it into the garbage bin, traded in my threadbare charcoal suit for five more, enough that I could wear a different suit each night of the week when I did the news. Betty had picked them out for me, given me a hundred ties.

Her business was doing well, too. She would drive --in, yes, her own car—out to the suburbs each morning and buy up clothes from all of the secondhand shops. They all knew her name, and they would give her first pick. The New York buyers loved her. The sofa where I used to sleep was now covered in designer dresses, in handmade ladies' hats waiting for a home.

In the evening we would come home, tired. We would go to bed.

\---

"You mean my mom used to work in fashion?"

"Oh, yes." I knew vaguely that she had left the industry after a while in Arizona. The story as far as I knew it was that she had gotten a position with a fashion magazine, which had led to an editorial position at a travel magazine, and so on and up from there. Until now, indeed, it was she who was selling magazine subscriptions. In a different way from how I had, of course, but that was her business all the same. "That was what had brought her to New Orleans. Her father had passed, and when she went to sell his house--imagine that--she threw open the door to the attic and found it full of her mother's dresses from long ago. Beautiful designer dresses, worn only once or twice. And yards and yards of pearls, and fine wigs. So she sold them all, and bought more. And she kept on going from there."

"Well of course she didn't want to dance, then."

"Hm?"

"In New Orleans. Her father had just died. Of course she didn't want to dance."

\---

In New York, dancing was all she wanted to do. "Baby, let's go to the jazz club again, like we used to," she'd say. She'd kick off her working shoes in the front room and wiggle her feet at me. "Why do you have to read all night?" It was in the early days of my show. I had an interview with a famous author the next day and was preparing by reading his latest work.

"Betty, be practical. Weren't you always the practical one?"

"How about you be practical? Look at you, you've let yourself get fat and lazy."

I would protest the second, but she was right about the first one. It was hard to come from a place where every other week I was starving, and then go to a place where every night I had to hope for the charity of others to find something warm to eat, and then be here, and not let myself get fat eating like I didn't know if I would have food tomorrow.

"You've always just taken me for granted. You don't care about what I want as long as I'm pleasing you. Well, I want to go dancing," she said.

"I know I'm not a small man, Betty," I said finally. "Everyone says it makes me more approachable."

"Ha ha," she said. "You've always been approachable. You know I've never been afraid of you, Al. We should go dancing."

\---

We touched down in Chicago around dusk. I bought him popcorn and a hot dog with all the fixings. We could have been like every other father and son but for the way he didn't quite meet my eye. He was quiet as he looked out the O'Hare windows, straining, I supposed, to see the tall city buildings to the east. Or perhaps he wasn't looking at much of anything.

We boarded our second plane as night fell. The lights of the towns below winked quietly on and sparkled in the darkness of the country.

I was starting to fall asleep, but he said, "Tell me the rest," and I supposed I had to do so.

\---

The show was growing more and more successful. I moved up to a primetime spot on Saturday morning, when everyone was getting their paper and sitting in front of the television with their eggs and toast or last night's takeout--I was already several hours awake and in makeup and laughing in my desk chair before the bright TV lights. Betty was doing well too, ever since we got the internet connection. She was selling to buyers all around the world, jetting from city to city to go to auctions and estate sales.

We were happy--well, I was happy and she was happy, both of us on our own, anyhow. We hardly saw one another. When we did, it was all simply ritual. We'd kiss and ask each other about our days. When we made love, it was hasty. When we said goodbye in the morning before leaving for the airport, I felt sad, but I wasn't sure if I missed her any less when we were together.

I found the pills by accident. It was one of our rare trips when we were both on the same flight, and she was packing and we were arguing about who was putting what in which bag, and that was when I found them.

"What's all this for?" I asked her.

"They have something for every ailment now," she said, too quickly. "This one's for headaches. This one's for hypertension. This one's for my sleep." She looked at me, saw I wasn't buying it. "Well, Al? Is there something you want to tell me?"

"No, no," I deflected her, the same way I deflected the athlete who told me I had an amazing story too, truly inspiring; the same way I deflected the politician who said they should stop allowing immigrants into this country. On the show, I never had a strong opinion. "I have no opinion about that. I have no opinion about that at all."

"You never have an opinion about anything, Al. You wouldn't have an opinion if the house was on fire. You'd just be sitting around laughing like you are now. Like it's something funny. Well I think the joke is on you, Al."

"It's one big joke," I said. "All of it."

But she hadn't told me the punchline yet.

\---

No, that came later. The divorce had just been finalized. We both had walked out of it feeling like we were trampled in the process, which I have come to think most likely means we both won. I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy in my new house in the small town at the foot of the Catskills. It was night. I was looking out the window. The streetlight cast an amber glow that sparkled and dispersed in the ice cubes bobbing in my glass of rum and coke.

The phone rang. It was Betty.

"What can I do for you?" I asked her nonchalantly, putting my feet up and grinning. I was free. I was free. I was free. I was--

"Al," she said, and it was clear she had been crying. "Congratulations. I'm pregnant. So--congratulations. You're--you're gonna be a dad."

\---

I never was. I never was a father for one day. His existence was a name on a birth certificate, a line item on my monthly expenses. Until now. And here he was, looking right at me, listening to me talk about myself, and I did not know a single damn thing about him.

\---

We touched down at JFK, the wheels screaming across the runway. Exhausted, we dragged our suitcases out to the parking lot, and I drove him deliberately away from the bright loud madness of New York City and out into the wide dark valleys where I lived. He finally dozed off in the passenger seat, his head lolling in that boyish way, and I woke him when we were parked in my driveway.

It was a one-bedroom house. I had set up a bed for him down in my office. He was looking cautiously at the walls.

"What are all these?" he asked me. He pointed at London. Detroit. The Balkans. The army post in the Indian Ocean. "This looks like junk."

"It is junk," I told him. I didn't want to look at them anymore and I didn't want him staring at them in the middle of the night. One by one, I took them down off the wall.

\---

In the morning we woke up and went to the café down the street for breakfast, where they know I like eggs and English muffins and bacon and they always say "Hi, Charlie." I felt something new when I walked in that door. It was fear. I was afraid to walk in there if the boy was with me. I was afraid they would see right through me to the failure of a father.

"Hi Charlie," they said, and I said hi back, and introduced them to my son.

We didn't talk much through breakfast. He still didn't seem to want to. In fact it wasn't until he was finishing up that he said, "Your dad sent you to America?"

"Yes."

"Where is he now?"

"Why, he's still there in my hometown in Africa." I still wrote to him from time to time. It would be weeks until my letter reached him, and weeks until I heard back.

"And your mom?"

"She passed long ago."

"Oh."

My mind was still on the jungle, the sounds of the missionaries singing hymns, the lasers in the hospital. The whitewashed walls of my father's house. What happens to us when we've outlived our purpose? I looked at my son and asked him cautiously, "You're out of school for the summer, right?"

"Yeah. Mom said I had to stay here in New York." He sounded resentful. I remembered being a boy in the summer. Playing soccer in the heat. The feeling of the rain pouring down on my face. Chasing stray cats. Eating fresh fruit. I thought of how I had resented him when I first saw him, never having to know poverty or hunger. And I wondered if a part of him was missing something else that I had known, myself.

And maybe that's why, as we left the café, we began to make plans for another journey. A longer journey. A chance for me to ask him all of the questions I hadn't asked on the airplane, as I told him my story, never thinking once that perhaps he had a story of his own to tell. A chance for him to see where he came from. It could have been all of those things, it could have been none. But I do know one thing.

For some reason I can't explain, there's some part of me wants to see Graceland.


End file.
